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202 BCE Battle of Zama, resulting in the defeat of Carthage and Hannibal.

125 BCE The first day of the 'Era of Tyre', according to 19^th-Century scholars.

439 The Vandals, led by King Gaiseric, took Carthage in North Africa.

1187 Death of Pope Urban III.

1216 (Or October 18): Death of King John of England (b. 1166 or '67) – he whom the rebellious barons forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. His nine-year-old son succeeded him and became King Henry III of England (1207 - '72).

Numerous, if fictitious, accounts circulated soon after his death that he had been killed by poisoned ale, poisoned plums or a "surfeit of peaches". However, the truth is probably that, while in retreat from the French invasion, John crossed the marshy area known as The Wash in East Anglia and lost his most valuable treasures, including some of the Crown Jewels, to the unexpected incoming tide. This dealt him a terrible blow, which affected his health and state of mind, and he contracted a fatal case of dysentery. He was buried in Worcester Cathedral in the city of Worcester.

1453 The French recapture of Bordeaux brought the Hundred Years War to a close, with the English retaining only Calais on French soil.

1741 Famous actor David Garrick (1717 - '79) gave his debut performance in the title role in Shakespeare's Richard III at London's Goodman's Fields Theatre, receiving a standing ovation. Garrick became the talk of the town, and went on to be one of the most successful actors Britain has ever known, and to manage the famous Drury Lane Theatre.

1745 Death of Jonathan Swift (b. 1667), author.

1781 Major General Lord Charles Cornwallis surrendered himself and 8,000 troops to George Washington and Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau at Yorktown, Virginia, ending the American Revolutionary War.

1812 Napoleon I of France retreated from Moscow, which the fleeing citizens had left in flames.

1813 The Battle of Leipzig concluded, giving Napoleon Bonaparte one of his worst defeats.

Disappointment for the Southcottians

1814 Today is the day that self-proclaimed English prophetess, Joanna Southcott (1750 - 1814), fixed as the date that she would give birth to a son (the Shiloh of Genesis 44: 10) who would be a great spiritual leader, in fact, the new Messiah.

When she was 64 she declared she would give birth to a child who would become a great spiritual leader on October 19, 1814. The appointed day came and went, Joanna Southcott fell into a trance, died on December 27 (qv) the same year, and was buried in St John's Wood Chapel.

"About the close of 1814, however, the prophetess herself began to have misgivings, and in one of her lucid intervals, she declared that 'if she had been deceived, she had herself been the sport of some spirit either good or evil.'"   Source

More such disappointments, in the Failed Prophecies page in the Scriptorium

1841 USA: Surrender of Tallahassee chief Tiger Tail after his battle against forced removal to the west.

1860 In Florence, Italy, the first company was formed for the manufacture of internal combustion engines.

1864 American Civil War: The Battle of Cedar Creek: The Union Army under Philip Sheridan destroyed the Confederate Army under Jubal Early.

1864 Confederate raiders launched an attack on Saint Albans, Vermont, USA, from Canada.

1872 Bernhardt Holtermann and Louis Beyers discovered the world's largest single mass of gold, the Holtermann Nugget, weighing about 286 kilograms (630 pounds), at the Star of Hope mine on Hawkins Hill at the town of Hill End, New South Wales, Australia.

"At this point in time, 2 a.m. on 19th October, 1872 and after the midnight firing a 'veritable wall of gold was revealed'.

"On 26th October, 1872 The Town and Country Journal reported in its telegram section under the heading Hill End, Saturday, 'Holtermann's landed a specimen last night weighing between 6 and 7 cwt., supposed to contain 2 cwt. of gold. More in the bottom. Great excitement.'

"It was photographed, measured and displayed. It is believed to have contained 3,000 ozs. of gold. This is the largest single mass of gold ever known to be recorded and it wasn't a one off. The quote, 'monster specimen' was crushed with 272 tons of other ore from the mine at the Pullen and Rawsthorne Stamper Battery yielding 15,488 ozs, and 11 dwts, of gold. A few months later a larger one was found and recorded in the day book from the mine. The record stated estimated gold content 5,000 ozs. with a total weight estimated at 7 cwt., the miners broke it up underground not wanting the arduous task of man handling another large piece to the surface just to see it eventually broken up and smelted."   Source

[A 'cwt', or hundredweight, is a unit of weight in the British Imperial System equal to 112 pounds (50.80 kilograms)]

Gold! Australia's Gold Rush    Welcome Stranger Nugget    Hand of Faith Nugget

1878 Henry James spent an awkward afternoon with George Eliot and philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes. As James left, Lewes, not realising he was talking to the author of the volumes, thrust a pair of blue bound volumes – the first edition of The Europeans – into his hands, saying, "Take them away, please, away!"

1889 Death of King Louis of Portugal.

1889 Scotland: The first nationwide school strike against corporal punishment began in Hawick, Roxborough and quickly spread across the Scottish lowlands then to Tyneside and as far south as London, Bristol and Cardiff .

1895 Australian poet Banjo Paterson's 'The Man from Snowy River' was published.

Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson

1901 Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873 - 1932) circled the Eiffel Tower in his airship to win the first aviation prize. Santos-Dumont is believed to have committed suicide by hanging himself in the city of Guarujá in São Paulo, on July 23, 1932.

1912 Italy took possession of Tripoli, Libya from the Ottoman Empire.

1914 The First Battle of Ypres began.

1923 The War Resisters League of the USA was founded by Jessie Wallace Hughan (December 25, 1875 - April 10, 1955).

Believing war to be a crime against humanity, the War Resisters League advocates Gandhian non-violence as the method for creating a democratic society, free of war, racism and human exploitation.

Celebrating WRL's 80^th Birthday    War Resisters' International

1933 Germany withdrew from the League of Nations.

1943 Streptomycin, the first antibiotic remedy for tuberculosis, was first isolated by researchers at Rutgers University, USA.

1944 United States forces landed in the Philippines.

1950 The North Korean capital of Pyongyang fell during the Korean War.

1954 The first ascent of Cho Oyu, the sixth highest mountain in the world.

1959 France: President Mitterand (1916 - 1996) escaped assassination by jumping out of motorcade during a high speed chase, leaping over a hedgerow, and burying himself in a bed of petunias. (After his death Mitterand's wife asked his mistress to attend his funeral.)

1960 Mauretania gained independence from France.

1960 USA: Martin Luther King, Jr, and 35 students chose jail after their arrest for a sit-in requesting service at the snack bar of Atlanta's Rich's department store.

1963 Sir Alec Douglas-Home (Sir Alice Doubtless-Whom as John Lennon called him in one of his books) succeeded Harold Macmillan as British prime minister when the latter suddenly resigned after being diagnosed with prostate cancer from which he was (wrongly) not expected to recover.

1966 American author (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Merry Prankster, Ken Kesey (1935 - 2001), back from Mexico, was arrested.

1973 US President Richard Nixon rejected an Appeals Court demand to turn over the Watergate tapes.

1982 USA: John De Lorean was arrested for trafficking in cocaine. It was announced that the De Lorean sports car company would close its Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, plant, with the loss of some 1,500 jobs in an area with an unemployment rate of 21 per cent.

1983 Maurice Bishop, Prime Minister of Grenada, was overthrown and executed the following day in a military coup d'état led by Bernard Coard.

1985 The first Blockbuster Video store opened, in Dallas, Texas, USA.

1986 Samora Machel, President of Mozambique and a prominent leader of FRELIMO, and 33 others died when their Tupolev 134 plane crashed into the Lebombo Mountains.

1987 In retaliation for Iranian attacks on ships in the Persian Gulf, the US Navy disabled three of Iran's offshore oil platforms.

1987 Black Monday: The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 22 per cent – a record 508.32 points; the stock market crash was greater even than the October 24, 1929 Black Thursday collapse, which kicked off the Great Depression.

1987 Australia: The first Spring cherries sold at Melbourne's Flemington Markets for a record $1,500 a 5kg box.

1989 The Guildford Four convictions were finally quashed by the UK Court of Appeal – they had spent 15 years in prison through a miscarriage of justice.

The Guildford Four were four people from Northern Ireland who were wrongly convicted in the United Kingdom in 1975 for the Provisional IRA's Guildford pub bombing, which killed five and injured hundreds people. The convictions stood despite Joe McAndrew, one of the actual terrorist bombers, subsequently admitting to the bombing.

Falsely convicted man Gerry Conlon's autobiography Proved Innocent was adapted into the Oscar- and Bafta-award winning 1993 film In the Name of the Father, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Emma Thompson and Pete Postlethwaite.

1991 Paul Glover bought a samosa at the Farmers' Market with Half HOUR #751 — the first use of Ithaca Hours.

From Wikipedia: Ithaca Hours is a local currency in Ithaca, New York. It is credited as the first modern local currency and has inspired similar systems throughout the world.

It is notable as one of three monetary reform measures named as viable alternatives to Bretton Woods system by United Nations conferences (the other two being UNILETS and the Global Resource Bank).

See also Local Exchange Trading Systems (the LETS Scheme)

Ithaca Hours Main Website   Founder's website    Australia LETS-linkup

EF Schumacher Society Local Currency website

Findhorn LETS    Time-based currency    Michael Linton

Open Money Project    LETSystem    More on Ithaca    Community currencies

We need more than LETS, by Ted Trainer, Australian alternative theoretician

1992 German police found the decomposed bodies of Petra Kelly (b. 1947, died on or about October 1, 1992), a founder of Germany's Green Party (Die Grünen), and former NATO general and peace campaigner, Gert Bastian, her longtime companion. The circumstances of their deaths are still shrouded in mystery, with many people believing they were assassinated.

The charismatic and internationally famous Kelly was the first Green in any parliament in the world and the first German female head of a political party. While working at the European Commission (Brussels, Belgium, 1971 - '83), she participated in numerous peace and environment campaigns in Germany and other countries. Kelly received the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize) in 1982 "... for forging and implementing a new vision uniting ecological concerns with disarmament, social justice and human rights."

Kelly was also a tireless campaigner on issues of human rights, an anti-Apartheid activist and organiser of the first international hearing on human rights violations in Tibet. At the time of her tragic death, she was the moderator of a weekly television show on environmental issues, that wove the threads of environment, health, peace, disarmament and human rights together in complex fabric that has been the model for today's resurgence of global environmental activism.

"Last October 19, German police entered an unimposing row house on the outskirts of Bonn, and made a gruesome discovery: the decomposing, bullet-pierced bodies of Petra Kelly, a founder of Germany's Green party, and Gert Bastian, Kelly's longtime companion. Conspiracists sniffed a double murder, possibly by neo-Nazis or by government agents. After investigating, however, police raised an even more troubling possibility. Mother Jones interviewed author Mark Hertsgaard, who recently traveled to Bonn to look into the case."
Source: Who killed Petra Kelly?

Kelly forecast the convergence of concerns that are the hallmark of anti-globalization advocacy of the current era. She also was a pioneer in identifying the linkages between issues of peace and democracy, development, the environment and women's rights.
Source

"Aside from the absence of a farewell note, more alarming signs pointed to the possibility of a third party's presence: inexplicably, the alarm system to the house had been turned off; the front door keys lay on the floor at the entrance; the upstairs balcony door was found unlocked. When they entered the house, police and relatives were met by an ominous hum: that of Gert Bastian's electric typewriter, which had been running for at least 18 days. Still in the machine, a sheet of paper revealed the contents of his last letter; he had only typed ten lines, when in the middle of the world 'müssen' (we/they have to, must), something interrupted him. To not even finish a word – he got as far as 'müssen' – suggests that a loud noise or movement may have interrupted him."
Source: The Death of Petra Kelly

Obituary    Happiness Is A Warm Gun    A Convenient Fiction

The Life and Death of Petra Kelly    Petra Kelly, Nonviolence Speaks to Power

Monika Sperr, Petra Karin Kelly   More    More

Wikipedia and David Brown's prodigious Daily Bleed are both excellent resources that aid my research.
I frequently make use of their generously liberal 'fair use', 'copyleft' and 'anti-copyright' policies, with much gratitude.
© My own copyright policy is also liberal, but as this is my livelihood, conditions apply.

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